Quick Inspiration

I came up with an entire Star Trek rpg adventure in about 45 minutes this week, and, to be honest, I’m feeling kinda proud of myself.

Here’s what happened:  I put some serious prep time into an episode that had been developing in the back of my mind since the first session of my current campaign. It’s got exploration of wondrous locales, a neat villain and what I hope will be a satisfying sci-fi twist in the final act.

But then two of the five members of my gaming group suddenly had scheduling conflicts pop up the day we were supposed to play. So I had two choices.  I could go ahead with the episode I’d originally planned, albeit with two fewer PCs than usual. Or I could quickly design a totally new adventure tailored for the three PCs who would still be present, thus allowing me to save the original adventure for when the crew is at full strength.

With about 45 minutes to spare during my lunch break, I decided to try to come up with something totally new. But I didn’t have any idea on how to proceed. Then I remembered how Matt Click, who runs the excellent YouTube channel A Fistful of Dice, drew inspiration from random Magic:  The Gathering cards.  I decided to do something similar but with Memory Alpha, perhaps the single most useful Star Trek resource on the web.

I started with the concept of the plant-based sentient beings that inhabit Arteline IV, as detailed in LUG’s ‘A Fragile Peace’ campaign supplement. The idea of intelligent plants has tickled my fancy for some time, but I hadn’t had a chance to work them into my campaign yet, so I decided that this new episode would involve them somehow. But that was all I had. The rest of the episode was a completely blank slate.

So, to fill in some of the blanks, I started clicking the ‘random page’ button on Memory Alpha until something caught my eye. I landed on the entry titled “Unnamed Ennis,” a background character from the DS9 episode ‘Battle Lines’ who was condemned to fight for eternity on a penal moon. It occurred to me that a penal facility where the inmates serve unending sentences would present an interesting sci-fi concept that could also double as a chance for some social commentary on the prison-industrial complex in the United States. 

I kept clicking on the random page button some more and found an entry on orbital gliders, and suddenly I had my idea for an action-packed climax. The PCs would get stranded in a strange prison and the only means of escape would require them to fly to safety on primitive gliders.  After that, it was just a matter of filling in the details.

I decided that Arteline society prohibited capital punishment. Instead, the Artelines utilize deep-space prison barges that resemble enormous greenhouses built and maintained by a private company that contracts with the planetary government. Corrections officers would inject condemned prisoners with an enzyme that basically robs them of their sentience and reverts them into what we Earthlings consider normal plants. The inmates, essentially, become permanent elements of the greenhouse ecosystem, never to return to Arteline society.

The crew will visit one of the prisons when a radical anti-corporate activist shows up and frees the prisoners, who have been reduced to mindless swamp-thing atrocities due to the correctional enzyme. The only means of getting back to the prison’s control room is by flying a set of gliders through the massive, domed structure. But doing so will make them easy targets for the newly freed convicts.

That’s just a bare outline. I’ve fleshed it out with a couple in-depth encounters and decision points that will hopefully force the PCs to think about the ethical ramifications of their role in the story. Still, not bad considering the story came out of nowhere with little time to prepare.

But, as a sad post-script to my story, a third member of my gaming group canceled because of a snowstorm, just as I was putting the finishing touches on the episode. That meant we wouldn’t have a quorum for the session, so the whole thing got scrapped.

For a moment, I was frustrated because my GM heroics were all for naught. But I quickly shrugged it off. Now, I have a complete episode in the can and waiting for me whenever I need it.

Thanks for reading, and I’d love to hear your methods for preparing a game session on short notice. Please feel free to leave a comment below!

Captain's Log: Ep. 1 'Judge, Jury, Executioner'

I've decided to title my session recaps "Captain's Log," for obvious reasons. This series of blog posts will summarize the events of each individual gaming session in my campaign and maybe offer an insight or two along the way.

I ran the first episode sometime during the late summer of 2015, but I don't recall the exact date. It was intended to be a one shot, but the players wanted to keep going. So we decided to plan a full campaign, which didn't get underway until November of 2015 due to scheduling conflicts and real life.

I based the first session on the adventure "Shakedown Cruise," which was included in LUG's Star Trek TNG core book. I modified the adventure at a few key points in an attempt to give my players more choice and to heighten the tension of the climax. I also sprinkled in some elements from "A Fragile Peace: The Neutral Zone Campaign" supplement book.

All five PCs started as lieutenants junior grade. The party includes Dr. Noxana Vasor, a Betazoid medical officer; Jak Vin Karka, a Tellarite engineer; Troy McClure, a human counselor/diplomatic officer; Pus, a Vulcan science officer; and T'yr Th'tetrek, an Andorian security officer. The campaign takes place just a few weeks after the events of Star Trek Nemesis in the Arteline Sector near the Romulan Neutral Zone.

So without further ado, here's the blow-by-blow recap:

A group of fresh-faced lieutenants arrived on Starbase 39-Sierra near the Romulan Neutral Zone, awaiting long-term assignment to the USS Fearless. While waiting for the Fearless to arrive, Lt. Pus, a Vulcan science officer, met with the starbase’s chief science officer to review some mysterious subspace sensor readings from a nearby black hole known as Collapsar 49.

Pus recognized the sensor readings as artificial transmissions sent from an unknown source into the black hole, which then directed the transmissions into Romulan Space. The Fearless was ordered by Fleet Admiral Elsa Kiel to investigate the source of those transmissions, a small Harrellian mining facility on a remote moon.

Meanwhile, Counselor Troy McClure was approached by Commander Matthew Deleo, the chief intelligence officer aboard the starbase. Deleo asked McClure to give him regular reports on any valuable intelligence the Fearless may encounter.

En route to the mining facility, engineering officer Jak vin Karka discovered that Lt. Cmdr. Aliok, the chief engineering officer, had improperly modified the aging vessel’s warp engines. The crew suspected Aliok may actually be a Tal Shiar spy and arranged for Dr. Noxana Vasor, a Betazoid, to surreptitiously scan him with her telepathic powers. Turns out, Aliok was not a spy and his modifications were an honest mistake.

Upon arriving at the moon, the Fearless away team found that the mining operation was actually a front for a Tal Shiar communications post. In addition to illegal Romulan communications technology, the Harellians also harbored a Tal Shiar operative named Tyrion, who appeared to be suffering some sort of psychological distress due to her mental conditioning.

The Harellians managed to erase most of the Tal Shiar communications sent through the facility, but the away team recovered a single message from Romulan space. The message directed the Harrellians to transport Tyrion to Psellus III, where she could receive medical help from a Tal Shiar operative referred to only by the code name “Proteus.”

Tyrion, in a brief state of lucidity, told Dr. Vasor that DeLeo is actually a Section 31 agent and would summarily execute her if she were turned over to Starfleet Intelligence. In an effort to buy the crew some time and protect Tyrion from her own insanity, Vasor put Tyrion into a state of suspended animation.

The Fearless then set course for Psellus III to find the Tal Shiar agent Proteus and end the Tal Shiar presence in the Arteline Sector.

So what kind of game am I running?

So what kind of game am I running?

That’s a great question, and I’m so glad you asked. I wouldn’t have put together two entire blog posts about the Last Unicorn Games Star Trek rpg unless I planned on actually running a game and putting the system through its paces on the table.

At the time of this writing, I’m four episodes into a Star Trek:  The Next Generation campaign set in the year 2380 aboard the Excelsior-class USS Fearless.  I’ve got five PCs who are playing the pre-generated characters from LUG’s TNG core book, and I kicked the campaign off with a modified version of the adventure also included in the book.

I’m shooting for a tone heavy on political intrigue, murky ethical dilemmas and character arcs. If I do it right, it should feel a lot like if Deep Space 9 had taken place on a starship.  That said, I definitely intend to throw in a heaping helping of strange new worlds and big sci-fi concepts to keep things firmly rooted in Star Trek’s optimistic view of the future.

Here’s the status quo for my crew:  Following the events of the film Star Trek Nemesis, during which the Romulan government was crippled by Shinzon’s coup, Starfleet has assigned the Fearless to patrol the Arteline Sector along the Romulan Neutral Zone. The chaos roiling Romulan space has put the entire Alpha Quadrant on high alert, and the Fearless has a front-row seat to all the drama.

The Fearless, herself, is an aging vessel. Her deck plates rattle when she goes to warp, and her finicky engines run on patience and ingenuity as much as antimatter.  Yet she’s a vessel with a proud history, serving valiantly during the Dominion War and virtually every other major Starfleet conflict of the last five decades. 

To form the political backdrop for the campaign, I’ve cannibalized a bunch of ideas from Nemesis, from various LUG source books and from a few handpicked Star Trek novels. Sometime soon, I’ll put together a dossier outlining some particulars of the Romulan political situation. It might be of interest to someone out there in internet land. But, even if it’s not, it would be helpful for me to have that information spelled out and clear in my own brain.

My decision to go with a post-Nemesis era series allows us to forge ahead without much concern for violating on-screen canon. The Fearless is free to participate in quadrant-shaping events without any possibility of stepping on the toes of the TV episodes or films. And, as I said in my first post, even if Nemesis leaves something to be desired as a movie, its aftermath sets up an intriguing status quo that I want to explore.

I think it’s safe to say my gaming group is having a good time so far. They’ve gotten into some mischief with the Tal Shiar along the Neutral Zone, and they’ve unearthed a powerful Iconian artificial intelligence known as Conduit. They’ve flirted with Orion dancers and haggled with shady Ferengi merchants. Next episode, they’ll search for a Romulan Bird of Prey that went missing near a massive black hole.

You know, all the normal stuff people do on the Final Frontier.

A review of LUG’s ICON system for Star Trek rpgs

Last Unicorn Games’ Star Trek rpg, first published in 1998, runs on an engine the designers called the ICON System. ICON brims with the sort of crunch and mechanics popular among tabletop rpgs during the late 1990s and early 2000s. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, nor does that disqualify the game from being any good.

But, in a gaming climate today that’s rife with “light” systems, I simply want to point out that this isn’t one of them. LUG’s Star Trek rpg packs some crunch and is very much a product of its time. One look at the standard character sheet, with its 24 blank slots for skills, should convince anyone that this game comes with a little bit of a learning curve. If it had been designed today, I suspect it would look quite different.

Don’t let that discourage you from giving it a shot, though, if you’re itching for a chance to play in the Star Trek multiverse. No modern game designer would describe LUG Trek as ‘light,” and ‘elegant’ probably doesn’t always apply either. But it’s greatest strength is that all that crunch was designed from the ground up to tell Star Trek stories. That lazer-like focus on creating a uniquely Trek platform pretty much saves the game and makes it a viable option today.

To paraphrase a different mega sci-fi franchise, ICON may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid.

LUG Trek strips away many of the conventions long associated with tabletop gaming that don’t really apply to how stories are told in Star Trek. Narrators (the term used for the GM) are encouraged from the start to do whatever they can to make players feel like they’re participating in an episode of Star Trek, not a session of D&D reskinned to look like Star Trek.

If everyone keeps that tenet in mind, a gaming group can have a blast with LUG Trek.

Character Creation -- Ugly Bags of Mostly Skills

The main criterion through which I view character generation in an rpg is whether the system allows for me to build a character that plays in a way that’s consistent with my original conception of the character. If I’m going to play Dungeons & Dragons, for instance, and I want to base my character on Conan or Aragorn or Elminster, does the character generation process allow me to churn out a character that captures that archetype? If the answer is yes, it’s probably a good character creation system. If not, you’re bound for frustration and disappointment.

Viewed through that lens, ICON does just fine. If you want to play a Vulcan science officer or a Betazoid doctor, you’ll end up with a character that has all the strengths, weaknesses and abilities you’d expect if that character appeared on an episode of Star Trek. You start with a race and then pick and overlay that acts much the same way as a class in D&D. You then pick packages that represent your character’s early life experience, education and previous tours of duty.

If you want a less Starfleet-focused campaign, there are options for raiders, merchants and spies in the DS9 core book and further options in the wide range of supplements Last Unicorn Games published while they had the Star Trek license.

So character generation succeeds in providing you with a pile of mechanics that approximate the kind of character you want to play. But the system takes a turn toward inelegance with the sheer number of skills each character will end up with. 

Starfleet characters are hyper-competent, so it stands to reason that a character in a Star Trek rpg would need a lot of skills. The standard character sheet in LUG’s Star Trek:  The Next Generation core book comes with 24 slots for skills, but that isn’t always enough for a new character. That’s a lot to keep track of, especially when each skill usually comes with a specialization. Filling out the character sheet becomes a chore, and remembering all the skills your character has is nearly impossible, at least in the first couple play sessions.

In summation, the ICON character generation works and produces characters that feel very Trek. But you usually end up with unwieldy bags of mostly skills.

Action & Combat:  The great Trek conundrum

The ICON system utilizes a d6 system that grants a player a dice pool equal to a character’s attribute level and then adds skill levels as modifiers to the roll.  It’s pretty standard rpg stuff that should feel familiar to anyone who’s played a lot of tabletop games.

Combat, however, poses a different challenge in a Star Trek rpg than it does in a traditional fantasy rpg setting. The series, at least in the prime TNG universe, often favored character development and ethical dilemmas over cinematic and detailed action. To be sure, action and combat have their places in any Star Trek series, but I struggle to think of many episodes that depended entirely on action to tell a story.

Accordingly, I try to make combat move as quickly as possible in my Star Trek campaign. Maybe there are folks out there who disagree, but I feel strongly that if you’re spending a majority of your sessions on combat, you’re probably not recreating the feeling of an episode of Star Trek.

And that’s where I think the designers of ICON made some missteps by creating mechanics that actually slow combat down. For instance, the default rules recommend players roll initiative at the beginning of each round. I prefer to do it once and then follow that order through the entire combat (which I try not to let drag on much past three rounds at a maximum). Or, even better, sometimes I don’t even bother with initiative. I’ll ask the players what they want to do once it becomes clear that combat is about to break out. Then, I simply have the bad guys respond appropriately to whatever the PCs decide.

Another mechanic that slows down the flow of combat is dodging. If I’m interpreting the rules correctly, players can choose to dodge any time an adversary makes an attack against them. The rule adds another interruption that can bog down a fight.

Some folks might be tempted to complain that the combat rules are too lethal, especially when phasers or disruptors are involved. Those rules make a lot of sense to me, though. If a brawl with a handful of aggressive Klingons escalates to the point where disruptors are drawn, there ought to be a serious chance of a PC getting dropped.

But overall, the melee combat rules will seem fairly standard to most tabletop veterans, even if they play a bit slower than I’d like.  It’s the starship combat rules that offer a more interesting challenge.

The developers of the game clearly put a lot of thought into the starship combat. They set out to give each crewmember something meaningful to do every round while making each PC’s role modular enough that a gaming group doesn’t get penalized for not having every bridge position filled.  For instance, a science officer has to get a sensor lock on a target every round of combat. If they establish a good sensor lock, the tactical officer gets a bonus for any attacks they make during the round. But if you don’t have a science officer, no sweat. You can ignore that rule and it won’t impact the game much. You need someone to fly the ship, fire weapons and keep track of shield strength and structural points.  Any additional crew beyond that is gravy.

I can almost see the game designers sitting around a conference table hashing out just how they can give every player something fun to do during starship combat while simultaneously keeping the system flexible enough to work with smaller groups. In that sense, the ICON system succeeds, and my hat is off to the designers.

But, just like melee combat, starship battles play pretty slowly, at least in my experience. Starship combat is deep and crunchy and simulates what you see on the TV show in many ways. It’s even got rules for the Picard Maneuver.  The downside is that starship combat, more than any other component of the system, comes with a learning curve that makes it somewhat difficult to teach new players.

Conclusion

The Last Unicorn Games Star Trek rpg line drew on the talents of a lot of good tabletop designers, including Steve Long, S. John Ross and Ross Isaacs. It was clearly built from the ground up with a focus on telling Star Trek stories, and, because of that focus, remains a viable option for enthusiastic gaming groups looking to play in the Star Trek multiverse.  The system shows its age in a few areas, mostly in the unwieldy number of skills characters possess and in the combat rules. But it works.

Many of the supplements produced by Last Unicorn Games to support the system are excellent and contain a lot of imagination and story seeds. I plan on reviewing individual supplements right here on this blog in future installments. Most of the books can be found online for fairly cheap too. If you like rpgs and Star Trek, then ‘make it so.’ (Sorry not sorry)

Tabletop Star Trek: Let's see what's out there

For the first time in about a decade, I'm really excited by the prospect of running a tabletop rpg set in the world of Star Trek.  And I have a recent viewing of Star Trek Nemesis to thank.

Look, I’m not sure I’d recommend that anyone go back and watch Nemesis, but one of the few things the movie has going for it is that its ending sets up a new status quo in the Alpha Quadrant that can go a lot of different ways. The thalaron weapon destroyed nearly the entire Romulan Senate, leaving a power vacuum absolutely begging to be filled with all manner of shadowy power plays and Federation heroics.

Just thinking about it conjures images of cunning Tal Shiar spies, privileged senators from storied families, dutiful admirals in command of birds of prey and the underground reunification movement that wants to forge a new era of peace between Romulus and Vulcan. Caught in the middle are the Remans, former slaves of the empire who yearn for their own planet and the autonomy that goes with it.

And poor Captain Riker -- along with the crew of the newly commissioned USS Titan -- sets out to monitor this political maelstrom and, whenever possible, advance Federation interests (as established at the end of Nemesis).

Will the Romulan Star Empire fall into chaos and civil war, thus destabilizing the entire region? Or will the powers of the Alpha Quadrant establish a stronger alliance than ever and usher the Romulan people into a new era of freedom and political openness?

A bunch of Star Trek novels have addressed those very questions, and I’ve read and enjoyed a handful of them.  But, with news of a brand-new Star Trek series hitting the net this week, I’m itching to dust off my old Last Unicorn Games rpg materials and have my regular gaming group answer those questions for themselves.

I haven’t played in the Star Trek universe since I graduated from high school over a decade ago. My skills as a game master (or narrator, as the GM is called in the LUG system) have grown considerably in that time. And the gaming group I’ve fallen in with loves Trek and role plays exceedingly well.  Long story short, the pieces are there for a truly remarkable experience in the Final Frontier, and I’m chuffed to bits to begin the campaign and see what’s out there.

I intend to document that experience on this blog.  I’ll recap our sessions, which will begin on Nov. 16. I’ll also discuss some of my techniques as a narrator and the unique challenges presented by a tabletop rpg attempting to negotiate the Star Trek Universe. Finally, I plan to provide some mini reviews of the individual LUG Star Trek products, from the core books to the optional supplements to the adventure modules.

So, without further ado, let’s make it so…